after a fairly long hiatus, I thought that I would try out a Microsoft web product for a change…

windows live writer and Windows Live Photo Gallery are both being tested.

Why ? coz i have been having issues with the new WP editor, and for some weird reason Flickr uploader has been acting funny !

are upload and download speeds, to and from flickr, slower than ever, or am I imagining it ?

Last Week
The last 10 days have been a fair tech disaster for me….. the site was down from the 2nd till the 9th because my previous hosting service got attacked by something while moving servers. The fact that they hadn’t informed me ( i am not sure of their other customers) about the move, and possible downtime - was exacerbated by complete and utter ineptitude while dealing with the crisis. I dealt with 7 different people over the 7 day period - each of whom was vaguer than the previous one….. And each of them responded, because of a mail from me … not because, they as service providers wanted to keep a customer in the loop…..This is a classic case study on customer mismanagement. I can understand and empathise with technical problems, I can’t with customer mismanagement. It is forgetting basics in business…

Finally when they restored the site…. there wasn’t even a message saying service restored. Therefore, I did what any paying  customer would do ….. changed the service provider.  When the site finally came back up…  i changed nameservers, moved host……..and was out before you could say blog……

Now

Moved to  a web hosting service provider called hostican.com. 200 GB space, 2000 GB bandwidth and great customer support (the last two days have been blissful in terms of restoring my site) — all for around Rs.2000 per annum. Hope that I don’t have to move for the next few years.

Am going to be doing up my new home over the next couple of days…..

I have finally upgraded my blog -

this is now running on

• WP 2.3
• The theme is 1st Zaxioma 1.03 by Zaki
• plugins include
  • FCKEditor
  • WP Flickr Post Bar
  • Subscribe Me
  • Comment Quicktags
  • Akismet

• Assorted widgets include
  • Feedburner Widget
  • Flickr Badge Widgtet
  • Google Search Widget

If you have any other plugin’s / widgets to recommend - please go ahead

Have finally overcome severe inertia to upgrade the site … to a new version of word press etal

This follows hot on the heels of me upgrading my machine at home….. am still finding my way around the new system …. personalizing it etal….

if the blog disappears for ever in the process of the upgrades…… it was nice knowing you……..:)

My earlier hosting service, the excellent Weblleyou is in the process of winding down their service.

And there i was, happily settled into my home - and had to move all over again. Given that in my childhood i moved 8 homes by the time I was in the 10th - i have this great aversion to moving - whether it is in the real world or the virtual one. Thankfully, the people who have taken over my hosting, The Host Group , provide an equally good service, and moving was relatively stress free. I may have gritted my teeth a couple of times over the weekend when the site was in limbo land between name servers — but then i am not really known for my patience.

After 18 months of using the extremely good Powweb hosting services, i moved to that offered by WebbleYou.

The move wasn’t without its’ fair share of drama. When the form asked me for my domain name for transferring, i gave them calamur.org rather than calamur.org/gargi which is the blog url. So the transfer was of a home page that said ‘under construction’. If someone else had done this - i would have sniggered at them. But, when it happened to me - there wasn’t much to do but to kick myself hard and call myself names. But, that didn’t really help to get the site back.
The contact person at WebbleYou - Justin Baeder - has been so extremely kind and helpful - and i am quite sure that the level of help and support provided goes way beyond what they are supposed to.The customer orientation - even with a completely idiotic situation like this - has been so very good. So if any of you are looking for a hosting service with a human interface - maybe you would want to check them out. It’s a decent deal - and the best part is that you can pay monthly rather than annually.

Everytime I think … and finally it is done, something else is found buggered up. No sooner than i had fixed the template issue and heaved a sigh of relief, than i discovered that the category archives don’t work. There is nothing more scary than pressing a category and finding error 404 I began wondering whether there was a black hole of wordpresswhere posts disappear never to be found.

After much searching - and the WP support forum is lousy on searches, i managed to get a 404 for everything - i finally stumbled on this - a patch for the functions-post.php and the classes.php and bingo everything works again. For now.

Technorati Tags: error 404, wordpress

…. I fixed the mess that had happened on the blog.

There was an unasked for javascript (so the validator told me) line somewhere on one of the recent posts. Somewhere between a quote from the Indian Express and DNA. This cost my about 4 odd hours of my life - very odd coz I am not a techie. And the sight of code makes my eyes glaze over.

Yet there is a certain joy in finding things and fixing them - especially when you know very little about it
WP is now upgraded to 2.02. The theme running is Sirius. Am trying to figure how to personalise it.btw there is a WP 2 theme competition running here - the results should be out in a week or so. Check it out. Also a whole bunch of plugins - like a technorati tags for WP 2 - my earlier WP site had that but it wasn’t compatible with WP 2.0. So this software sent opportuinty of fixing my site meant that inertia got shaken off and R&D got done. And hopefully things will work fine from this point on

Technorati Tags: Word Press, Technorati, SimpleTags

The last few days i have been having a few problems with my WP template. All of a sudden the alignment buggered up, posts were truncated and the sidebar shifted itself to the other side. Wierd.

The problem essentially was with the flickr badge. It somehow suddenly decided to develop an allergy to my site.

SOftware with attitude - what next!